The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (6 page)

The masters accepted the verdict of the boys as to who was in and who was out. They had spent all their lives in public schools and had carried over with them from their student days a desire to be liked by the right sort of boys, whose favour they courted by openly showing their distaste for boys like me. As for Prowse, he was a favourite of the masters. He could do no wrong in their eyes, and when he committed some minor offence like arriving late for class, he grinned sheepishly at them and they grinned back, as if he was the kind of plucky, likeable rascal they wished they had been at public school.

The masters never seemed to know quite what to make of me. They seemed unconvinced that my popularity would last and were therefore unwilling to commit themselves. They did not mind the presence at college of a few of what Reeves called the great unwashed. Our being there, far from undermining the class order, was a reminder of its existence. But there seemed to be an unwritten rule that for us, only a kind of small-time, limited success was possible. We could climb to the top rung of our little ladder, but we could not switch to the larger ladder the others were climbing, as they likewise could not switch to the ladders atop which the masters stood.

Sometimes I caught Reeves looking at me, sizing me up as if he was wondering if I understood this, wondering what I imagined I was doing, hobnobbing with the likes of Prowse. I think it
was in an unconscious effort to assure him, or perhaps to fool him into thinking, that I knew my place that I became class clown — no amount of success was wholly legitimate that came by way of clowning; a clown who got the highest marks in school was still a clown. Like Shakespeare’s Fool, I was able to get away with saying almost anything. It also gave the masters a certain latitude with me.

In class, at least, Reeves could be the kind of engagingly cynical teacher boys find entertaining, a teacher easily diverted from his lesson to hold forth on the universal awfulness of things, especially things as they were in Newfoundland as opposed to England, and as they were everywhere now as opposed to how they used to be.

“Get Reeves going,” Prowse told me as we were filing into class.

I started by asking him what he had against living in Newfoundland. “What have you got against Newfoundland, sir? Don’t you like it here, sir? It’s not so bad once you get used to it. Do you miss merry olde England, sir? It must be lovely there this time of year. What does your wife miss most about it, sir?” Reeves, knowing what I was up to but loathing teaching as much as we loathed being taught, pushed back his chair, put his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, threw back the sleeves of his black gown with a flourish and, tapping his pointer/swagger stick on the desk as if he were counting out the stresses in a line of poetry, began.

“The worst of our lot comes over here, inbreeds for several hundred years and the end-product is a hundred thousand Newfoundlanders with Smallwood at the bottom of the barrel.”

“And you as my teacher, sir,” I said.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have, Smallwood?” Reeves asked.

“Six, sir.”

“My God,” he said. “What are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have, sir?” I said.

“I am an only child,” Reeves said.

“Your parents must be very proud of you, sir,” I said. “Your having got such a superb posting as Bishop Feild, I mean. Have they been to visit lately?”

Reeves’s previous posting had been in India, where, he swore, the students spoke better English than did Newfoundlanders.

“We understand each other, sir,” I said, indicating my classmates. “It’s you we can’t make out.”

On and on we went, Reeves smiling all the while as if it didn’t matter if I got the best of him, as though he was holding in reserve some trump card he could not be bothered wasting on the likes of me. He never cut me short by invoking his authority or threatening to punish me for disrespect. He was far beyond believing that character-shaping was possible or even desirable.

Like most cynics, he seemed to have contrived his own disillusionment by starting out expecting more from the world than he knew it could deliver. There was still the faintest trace of the youthful idealist in him, though, and it was that which made him dangerous.

“There is no poetry worth reading after Tennyson,” Reeves said. “There are no novels worth reading after Dickens,” as if, in an age of mediocrity, individual failure such as his was excusable, inevitable. Not just Newfoundland, but the New World in general was a cultureless outback, he believed, though for Newfoundland he reserved his greatest scorn.

“It’s not that I’m blaming you,” he said. “It’s not your fault your so-called country has no culture.”

He read aloud Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to equal those. He held up a copy of
David Copperfield
and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to rival that. “It takes thousands of years to make a great culture, a great civilization,” he said.

“Prowse’s grandfather wrote a great book,” I said. “It’s called
A History of Newfoundland
.”

“A history of Newfoundland cannot be great,” Reeves said, “because there is no greatness in Newfoundland. I have not read, and will not read, the book you speak of, of course, but I have no doubt that it is a well-researched, competently written chronicle of misery and savagery, full of half-educated politicians and failures-in-exile like myself and their attempts to oversee and educate a population descended from the dregs of the mother country.” He looked at Prowse as if to say, “Not even for you, Prowse, not even for you and your book-writing grandfather will I make exceptions.”

“Think of it,” he said, “many of you are descended from people who couldn’t even make the grade in Ireland, a country of bog-born barbarians, or in Scotland, whose culture peaked with the invention of the bagpipes. My God, it boggles the mind. If you lot are the elite of Newfoundland, what must the rest be like? Smallwood here we may think of as the riff-raff’s shining star. Try to imagine someone in comparison with whom he would seem to be a shining star. No, the mind balks, it is beyond imagining. The riffraff are out there, we know by extrapolation from Smallwood that they exist, but luckily for us, we cannot picture them.”

At the end of my first year, I was eighteenth of nineteen in the Lower Third. My mother took it in stride. “They’ve all got a head start on you,” she said. “You’ll catch up. And remember, even with all his advantages, one boy finished lower than you did. Imagine how he feels.” I was not much cheered by the thought that it was especially humiliating for a boy to be judged inferior to me. My “character” mark was forty-five out of five hundred, the lowest, not only in the Lower Third, but in all of Bishop Feild.

My father denounced this as a slur on the name of Charlie Smallwood. “Character,” he said. “They wouldn’t know character if it smacked them in the face.” He said it was obvious that they measured a boy’s character by how rich his father was, by
how fine his clothes were. What mark had they given Baker’s boy, he wondered, who had snubbed poor Baker in the street?

“If you think of God as five hundred, then forty-five is not so bad,” my mother said.

“God?” my father said to her. “What has God got to do with it? Is God enrolled at Bishop Feild?”

Numbers haunted him and he could not get these particular numbers out of his head. My first night back on the Brow, he played around with them every which way on a piece of paper at the kitchen table, adding up columns of figures with his pencil, dividing, calculating percentages, pouring himself glass after glass of rum. He was still at it when I went up to bed.

“Forty-five out of five hundred,” he roared. “Forty-five out of five hundred, nine per cent. Four hundred and fifty-five marks missing. Two hundred and five marks short of barely passing. Can you imagine the gall? I suffer from a ninety-one per cent character deficiency. Ninety-one per cent of my character just isn’t there.”

He called out to me from the bottom of the stairs. “It is not you who has been judged, boy,” he said. “It is your father, your poor father. I want you to tell Headmaster Reeves that I have judged his character to be fifteen out of five hundred. No, no, that’s too much. Tell him I have judged his character to be absent altogether. Zero. Null. That’s his mark for character from me. Tell him that as far as I can tell, he has no character at all.”

Marks for school subjects were assigned by the teachers who taught them, but Headmaster Reeves judged the character of every boy in the school, so I had expected a low character mark, if not one quite so low, for my “interview” with him had not gone well. (Each of us went to see him near year’s end for our character interview.) He said I had a tendency for “romancing,” by which he meant day-dreaming. The other teachers reported to him that I was often caught at my desk staring at lists of names I had composed that had my own name at the bottom. Convinced, for instance, that I would myself write a history of Newfoundland as Prowse’s grand-father
had done, I compiled this list of Newfoundland historians: Judge John Reeves, The Reverend Lewis Amadeus Anspach, The Reverend Charles Pedley, The Reverend Philip Toque, The Reverend Moses Harvey, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, Joseph Robert Smallwood. I compiled a list of Newfoundland’s prime ministers, a line of succession that ended with me: The Right Honourable Sir Joseph Robert Smallwood, K.C.G.M., P.C., M.H.A. Reeves assured me, laughing at his own cleverness, that no one as “benighted” as me would ever “be knighted.”

I read a lot of books that Reeves deemed to be improper, that is to say books written by non-Englishmen. I read
The Last of the Mohicans, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick
.

At the time of my interview with Reeves, I had heretically been attempting a book not even written by someone who spoke English,
War and Peace
, a copy of which I had got as a Christmas present. I fancied that I would one day write a book that did for Newfoundland what
War and Peace
had done for Russia, a great, national, unashamedly patriotic epic.

“You’re a great reader, aren’t you, Mr. Smallwood?” Reeves said. “Always going about with extracurricular books beneath your arm. And what books they are, too; big books for a boy your age. Every time I see you, I say to myself, There goes little Smallwood, another load of books beneath his arm. What’s he up to, I wonder, what’s he thinking? I tell myself that in a way, it’s a good sign, all this extra reading. He must be confused, he must be searching for something in those books. He’s no ordinary young man, he doesn’t take things at face value. He wants to know, what’s the expression, he wants to know what makes things tick?”

This was one of his favourite rhetorical devices, to pretend to be groping for some phrase, to be unschooled in the ways and expressions of the world, so preoccupied was he with more important things.

“I was like that once. I used to ask myself, what are they called, the Big Questions. I fancied I could understand the answers.”

He looked at me as if he was waiting for me to agree or disagree with this assessment of myself. All I could think to do was raise my eyebrows.

He performed a series of ironically dismissive gestures: adjusted his glasses, smoothed his moustache, put his hands on his hips.

“You’ve got a book there now,” he said. “Let me see it.” He held out his hand.

“
War and Peace
,” he said in a tone of weary amusement, as if he had so often countered its claims to greatness that to do so again would be a waste of breath. He moved the hand that held it up and down appraisingly, then shrugged. He held it out at arm’s length. “Perhaps the greatest novel ever written by perhaps the greatest novelist of all time,” he read, laughing slightly. “Oh my, oh my, oh my. Now, Mr. Smallwood, you probably read that, ‘The greatest novel ever written,’ and you say to yourself, Imagine if someone said that about a book of mine. That’s it, isn’t it?”

He spoke this last sentence in a sympathetic tone, as though he was inviting me to confide in him, as if to say I need not be embarrassed about owning up to it, here was my chance to get it off my chest, to unburden myself; as if to say he knew what it was to labour under such prideful illusions as believing oneself to be destined for greatness.

“Leo Tolstoy,” he read, “1828–1910. So where is Leo perhaps-the-greatest-novelist-of-all-time Tolstoy now, Mr. Smallwood? Can you tell me that, where is poor old Leo now?”

“Right there,” I said, pointing at the book. He raised his eyebrows in mock acknowledgement of my quick-wittedness. Then he reached again into the desk and came out with a large, leather-bound edition of the Bible, which he placed side by side on the desk with
War and Peace
. He bent slightly forward over the desk, extended his hands like a merchant displaying his wares or like a magician inviting you to see that his props were exactly what he said they were.

“Well?” he said, looking up at me with a kind of canny smile.

“Sir?” I said, pretending not to know what he was getting at.

As if my reaction had confirmed some hunch of his, he put the Bible back in the drawer and handed me my
War and Peace
.

“You’re planning to write the great Newfoundland novel, is that it?” he said. “
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy.
Fish and Chips
by Joey Smallwood.”

He stood up and turned his back to me, looking out the window.

“Pride goeth before a fall, Mr. Smallwood,” he said. “I was myself once full of pride. And pride is the greatest of all sins, the sin over which the first war was fought, the sin because of which Lucifer and his rebel angels were driven out of heaven and cast into the pit of hell. I want you to remember that. You can go now.”

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter One: